Psychiatry’s Achilles heel is the relationship between race and diagnosis. According to the rhetoric of mental health professionals, mental illness strikes indiscriminately, and there is no such relationship. In reality doctors are more likely to label people of color seriously mentally ill than they are people of northern European descent.

Although schizophrenia has been shown to affect all ethnic groups at the same rate, the scientist found that blacks in the United States were more than four times as likely to be diagnosed with the disorder as whites. Hispanics were more than three times as likely to be diagnosed as whites.

Zeber, who studies quality, cost and access issues for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, found that differences in wealth, drug addiction and other variables could not explain the disparity in diagnoses: “The only factor that was truly important was race.”

Over-diagnosis is not a myth according to Jonathan Metzl, author of the recently published The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became A Black Disease, whose book was recently covered in a review for Science Daily.

Black men are over-diagnosed with schizophrenia at least five times higher than any other group — a trend that dates back to the 1960s, according to new University of Michigan research.

Studying the archives of the Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, Metzl learned that black people from Detroit were often misdiagnosed schizophrenic, and sent there, during the civil rights era.

How the psychiatric profession defined schizophrenia also changed during this period [’60s and ’70s]. In the 1920s-1940s, doctors considered the illness as affecting non-violent white individuals (mainly women), but later changed the language to violent, hostile, angry and aggressive as a way to label black men, he added.

Pathologizing violent behavior has become a trend of late, hasn’t it? Perhaps the genesis of this trend was not such an innocent one as a unwary observer might at first think.

Too many people have been labeled mentally ill, and too many of those people so labeled are non-white. I am not at all surprised by these results, and I hope that in the future further research will be applied to this matter of racial bias in the diagnosis of mental illness.